Louisiana’s Grad Act of 2010 Legislation: Choking Four-Year-Colleges

February 7, 2015

Below are comments that appeared on my February 06, 2015, post about Louisiana’s requirement that first-time freshmen have minimum subscores of 18 in English and 19 in math on the ACT in order to be admitted into Louisiana’s four-year higher ed institutions.

The comments include valuable information regarding a piece of legislation passed in 2010 and phased in, the Grad Act. So, here they are as their own post. The author is known as ulyankee:

The reason the admission criteria are what they are is not just because the Board of Regents decided unilaterally to raise the bar. It is because it was written into GRAD Act. GRAD Act I states that four-year institutions are not allowed to offer developmental education unless there is not a community college in the region. The Board of Regents admission criteria were announced in April 2010, right at the start of the legislative session when GRAD Act I was introduced. They went into effect at statewide institutions (ULL, UNO, LaTech) in 2012 and regionals in 2014. LSU’s standards were already at the state minimum at that time.

So when you read articles about state institutions experiencing drops of enrollment, especially those in the New Orleans area, it’s not because students don’t want to go there anymore.

Oh… and SAT and even COMPASS scores can be used in place of the ACT to determine if a student is college-ready in math and English. Not just ACT. But since Louisiana is an ACT state and all our students now take the ACT, the vast majority of students are using those for college admission and not other test scores.

Like this:

Related

Part of the RTTT application was that each state had to get an agreement from every college and university in the state that they would accept students that graduated from HS passing the final graduation test without remediation. And of course they all agreed. At least they did in TN. It is also included in the Federal Register describing this requirement. TN giving free Community College and now the push for national free Community College becomes a little clearer now doesn’t it. It has nothing to do with the Governors concern over cost. Obama pressured TN into to offering this so they could come back and say it wasn’t our idea they created the idea in TN. But you can see where this is leading I am sure.